Successful Social Media Campaigns Require Planning

Social media campaigns shouldn't be seen as a series of individual posts. Planning is crucial if you intend to run a successful social media campaign and it can take weeks or even months to do well. In this article, we're taking a look at 5 examples of excellent social media campaigns to understand their strategies and see what we can learn from them.

Five examples of successful social media campaigns

1. Dove: “Choose Beautiful.”

Dove creates great campaigns for their beauty products. Their campaign message is that they enhance not only physical beauty but also the beauty within. In this campaign, they focused less on their product and more on their mission, and that is for women to see that they are truly beautiful. In this campaign, they were able to connect with their audience.

ROI: With over 5 million views on Youtube, it has reportedly helped boost Dove sales by a whopping 30% - they went from $2.5 billion to $4 billion.

2. General Electric: “Kumiko’s First Ultrasound”

GE is known as the “most exciting boring brand” because of their active presence in the social media. The brand is entertaining, informative, and educational when it comes to their social media campaigns. In “Kumiko’s First Ultrasound,” GE joins the power of their products with the effects they have on the people who use and get to experience them.

3. Johnnie Walker: Keep the Flame Alive

Johnnie Walker published a video on YouTube to impart a rather hopeful message on social media. They challenged the pessimistic views of the country of Lebanon, and showed the resilience of the Lebanese spirit. The #KeepWalkingLebanon campaign was all about the hope and determination that kept the flame of the spirit alive.

ROI: This social media campaign drove a 20% increase in their market share and a reported $766,000 in earned media.

4. Dollar Shave Club: Our Blades are F***ing Great

This campaign has been referenced many times in marketing case studies, but it never gets old. It is just hilarious! The hyperactive founder keeps you entertained as he spills out everything you need to know about the product and more. Here you can see that humor is an effective way to get your message across. Viewers, just like marketers are sure to watch this again and again.

ROI: The campaign got 12,000 customers in their two days, raised over $72 million and the video now has over 23 million views on YouTube.

5. American Express: “Small Business Saturday”

The goal of this social media campaign was to feature small shops around major cities. Then, to show how they continue to uphold the traditions and history of their cities. American Express created the “Small Business Saturday” as a campaign to remind consumers to shop small by visiting local shops, like bookstores and clothes shops.

ROI: American Express helped vendors to better connect and engage with their online audiences through social media. These businesses could also set-up Facebook pages as they had high quality videos and photographs made for them. In return, they increased the number of businesses who accept their payment method.

Preparing your social media campaign

Preparation may be the most difficult part of your campaign. It will spell the difference between success and failure. In a social media campaign there are three key stages, the preparation, campaign execution and post-campaign analysis. Getting each individual stage right is essential to your success. Each has specific tasks that need to be addressed, let's see what they are.

Establish your campaign goals

You must set goals for your campaign and decide its overriding aim. Perhaps it will be to increase the number of followers, launch a product or create lots of engagement. The first step is always to outline the things you want to accomplish with your campaign. Envisioning your social campaign will help you in achieving its goals for your business.

There are two types of goals that you can focus on, broad goals and measurable goals. Broad goals will help you and your team in understanding the objective behind your social media campaigns. But they have to be complemented with specific measurable goals so you can track your progress along the way.

Consider these goals: brand awareness, lead generation, customer acquisition, thought leadership, and engagement. With a good social campaign, you can achieve most of these goals if the market position of your company is favourable. In the meantime though, you can select two of these and focus on achieving them. You can add more goals when you know you can give more time and attention to working on them.

In creating specific goals, the SMART paradigm is an excellent guide. It stands for “specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.” Having this as a guide will help you in formulating goals that are reasonable and clear-cut. It eliminates distractions, so your social marketing team can focus on a particular task and goal each day.

Choose which social media platform is best

Once you have established your campaign goals and strategy, you need to decide which social media platforms are best to deliver it on. Whichever avenue you choose, remember that it must reflect your target audience. You should always aim to get the message across clearly and reach as many quality prospects as you can.

When you have decided on your specific and broad campaign goals, you will be able to construct your social media campaign around them. It's key to be continuously engaging the prospects on social media and to engage with leads as quickly as possible. Each goal can be broken down into daily social media management tasks, making sure they align with the overall campaign strategy.

Create content and distribute it

The first thing that you can do is to consider the pool of content that you already have. You might be surprised, but you can put most old content to good use. Repurposing content is vital in this day and age, but keep in mind that it has to be of high-quality and on-brand before you can re-publish it. Once this is done, you need to create new content for your social media campaign. Keep in mind that you can promote content on many channels - both online and offline. Consider adding your content to product pages, email newsletters, packaging and posters.

Keep in mind that social posts should be visually appealing and engaging, so don't make most of them text-based. Fill your timelines with images, trivia facts or even intriguing questions for your followers. Remember the SMART goals you set at the beginning of the campaign, as they will help bring you measurable results.

Make sure you are engaging enough

After your content has made its way online, your audience will need to feel that there are real human beings behind your product or service. To achieve this, you need to ensure that your brand is active on social media - pay attention to who likes and comments on your posts. Don’t forget to post your own comments in response. Engage and communicate with people, delight prospects and those who are already customers. All this helps to promote and humanize your brand.

Another thing to remember is that posting at a consistent frequency is key to social media success. Use your social media management platform and create a calendar for automatic publishing. Schedule your posts in such a way that the most prospects will them and are expecting them.

How do you know your campaign a success?

Once your campaign is over, you can take a step back and assess your progress you’ve made compared to your original goals. Assess what went well or did not, this will help you plan your future campaigns.

If you use the SMART system, you’ll easily be able to tell if your goals were achieved. If you’ve fallen short, it may be simple to explain. Maybe you didn’t achieve your goals because of how the campaign was executed, alternatively you may not have set right goal in the first place. If you were able to meet your goals, then try to replicate your successes in future campaigns, whilst working on achieving other goals. Remember that your social media campaigns should always be goal-oriented.

Let me know in the comments what you think about these tips! Were your previous campaigns a success or are you just planning your first one? Remember to have fun and make sure your customers enjoy the content you make too.